TOCICO

Aerospace companies design, produce, and maintain complex machinery for both commercial and defense applications. Many aerospace companies, including Boeing, Bombardier, Spirit AeroSystems, Korea Aerospace Industries, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and others, have adopted Aurora to help operationalize critical chain project management (CCPM), resulting in notable improvements such as enhanced schedule adherence, reduced flow time, and decreased variability. CCPM Software provides extensive intelligent scheduling and project management capabilities, including the world’s most advanced CCPM. Achieving these results involves overcoming two significant challenges: defining the critical chain and effectively communicating it within the factory. Complex manufacturing environments face unique challenges in determining the critical chain due to the number of tasks involved in each project, the volume of constraints between tasks, and the variability of the critical chain. There are also unique requirements that need to be modeled for aerospace applications to capture the richness of their manufacturing and maintenance projects, which have required adaptations to CCPM software and enhanced its ability to implement CCPM. While specific CCPM implementation details are often confidential due to the competitive advantage they can provide, we can explore general approaches these companies have taken and how they've contributed to the Theory of Constraints (ToC) community. This case study focuses on the contributions stemming from defining the critical chain and how meeting the unique requirements of aerospace manufacturers has significantly enriched the broader field of the Theory of Constraints.